er, and that she had become only a burden and
a menace to him. He might decide to do away with her, to kill her.
He would not do it himself; he never did his own dirty work, but the
Russian girl--Olga was in love with Jim Doyle. Elinor knew that, as she
knew many things, by a sort of intuition. She watched them in the room
together, and she knew that to Doyle the girl was an incident, the
vehicle of his occasional passion, a strumpet and a tool. He did not
even like her; she saw him looking at her sometimes with a sort of
amused contempt. But Olga's somber eyes followed him as he moved, lit
with passion and sometimes with anger, but always they followed him.

She was afraid of Olga. She did not care particularly about death, but
it must not come before she had learned enough to be able to send out a
warning. She thought if it came it might be by poison in the food that
was sent up, but she had to eat to live. She took to eating only
one thing on her tray, and she thought she detected in the girl an
understanding and a veiled derision.

By Doyle's increasing sullenness she knew things were not going well
with him, and she found a certain courage in that, but she knew him
too well to believe that he would give up easily. And she drew certain
deductions from the newspapers she studied so tirelessly. She saw the
announcement of the unusual number of hunting licenses issued, for one
thing, and she knew the cover that such licenses furnished armed men
patrolling the country. The state permitted the sale of fire-arms
without restriction. Other states did the same, or demanded only the
formality of a signature, never verified.

Would they never wake to the situation?

She watched the election closely. She knew that if Akers were elected
the general strike and the chaos to follow would be held back until
he had taken office and made the necessary changes in the city
administration, but that if he went down to defeat the Council would
turn loose its impatient hordes at once.

She waited for election day with burning anxiety. When it came it so
happened that she was left alone all day in the house. Early in the
morning Olga brought her a tray and told her she was going out. She was
changed, the Russian; she had dropped the mask of sodden servility and
stood before her, erect, cunningly intelligent and oddly powerful.

"I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle," she said, in her excellent
English. "I have work to do."

"Wo